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Scraping The Scrapers With Feed Footer WordPress Plugin

This is an update about Ankesh Kothari’s RSS Feed Footer WordPress plugin. The plugin allows you to add messages under all your new blog posts in your RSS feed. While the number one use of the plugin would be to sell RSS ads, I’ve found another great use for it – sending a message to all those lazy asses who try to scrape my RSS feed.

Because I offer a full feed RSS, it’s very simple for a scraper to take the feed and reproduce the information onto another site. Scrapers are really the lowest form of Internet life. They don’t want to put in the work it takes to build a successful site so they just steal the works of others by scraping their feeds. There are even get rich quick scams that will sell this type of service.

To help prevent some of the damage scrapers do to my blog, I’ve used the Feed Footer plugin to add this message at the end of the post:

Attention: Unless you are reading this from a RSS reader, you are reading a scraped feed. This site has violated copyright laws by stealing the content of John Chow dot Com. Please let us know where you read this so we can take legal action against the scraper.

The above message only shows up in the RSS feed (subscribe to it if you want to see it) – you will never see it on this blog. However, that message will show up on a scraper blog because they steal content with RSS. Once the scraper read the above message in ever new posts, he’ll think twice about keeping the feed up. If he keeps the feed up, hopefully someone reading the message will alert me so I can take more action against the scraper.

You can download the Feed Footer plugin here or read more information about the plugin here. Ankesh did a great job on this plugin and I sent him a pitcher of beer for writing it.

Outstanding! Stop them in thier tracks. It would be pretty stupid for someone to do tht now. Beside your work is so distintive why would they think they can just put thier name on it and expect to be believable. They are idiots.

Scrapers really are a pain in the ass. They are exactly what John says they are and yet you see them being sold all the time. People just buy them and think they are going to cash in with no work involved. Good luck with that. 🙄

I actually welcome scrappers (sometimes). Helped me build massive inlinks launching my site to high rankings. The internal linking within posts carries over to the scrapper sites creating more inbound links.

The problem comes when they start passing off your work as their own. I don’t mind people linking to my work, but when they simply copy my site onto theirs, I stop being thankful for the few links I get out of it.

Yeah, unfortunately it’s pretty easy to remove links with programming. Scraping a page/feed is so easy, and I wish there was some way to stop it. I know there are some services out there that will proactively search out scraped content for you, but have never used any of them.

I don’t think this plugin will help to a major extent. You see, scrapers use softwares to pull content form your blog via your RSS feeds. However, these softwares can be programmed to ignore links or only take the first,say, 50 words in the blog entry. In that sense, it will totally ignore the links at the footer of the feed.

I don’t think this plugin will not help to a major extent. You see, scrapers use softwares to pull content form your blog via your RSS feeds. However, these softwares can be programmed to ignore links or only take the first,say, 50 words in the blog entry. In that sense, it will totally ignore the links at the footer of the feed.

“Attention: Unless you are reading this from a RSS reader, you are reading a scraped feed. This site has violated copyright laws by stealing the content of John Chow dot Com. Please let us know where you read this so we can take legal action against the scraper.”

Hey, good tip. Might I suggest that you put a auto-generated alphanumeric bit-o-text in the middle (or somewhere) in that statement so that it is different everytime. So that the spammers can’t just regex-out that statement…

If there was a “49djhsdj5” somewhere, they wouldn’t be able to remove it as the regex will fail…

This is interesting. I’ve seen a few blogs that I read add this and wondered about it. For the most part I’m a knit blogger (there are thousands of us!) and many have problems with scrapers stealing copyrighted content either words, knitting patterns or images.
Thanks for the heads up. I kept forgetting to ask fellow knit bloggers about it.

I don’t understand why you care so much about scrapers.
So yeah, they steal your content, in nearly every post you make, you have a few links to oter posts you made, so here you get some links.
Plus, you have a few posts with affiliate links, so more people see your affiliate links.

I only wish my blog was scraped more often, I can use it in so many ways.

Sounds like a good idea but probably doesn’t deter anyone from scraping your site.

Why?

Because most scraper sites contain 3 sets of google ads above the fold so I’m sure no one would even see your disclaimer.

What I think it does do is make your readers feel like they’ve done something wrong because you are making them read your “Rant” – even if they are reading it from their rss reader you are totally distracting people from your purpose by trying to police a few.

"How I Went From Zero to Over $100,000 a Month"

The Original Dot Com Mogul

John Chow, a damn fine person, friend of the community, Ultimate Fighting Championship contestant, member of the Save the Whales Foundation, the man who controls the black market on baby seal pelts and member of the probably yo’ daddy foundation...

John Chow rocketed onto the blogging scene when he showed the income power of blogging by taking his blog from making zero to over $40,000 per month in just two years.